Hi everyone. I was watching a demo video of PSIO on youtube playing back Final Fantasy 7 and I was pretty impressed by how fast the game went. However, since it was only the Alpha version it might have been the result of inaccurate emulation rather than an intended feature given that also the audio in the opening fmv is out of sync. In the bugfixes thread no issue of that nature was reported for ff7 and everything else confirmed to be working. So I wonder how fast the current build of PSIO really is, I know it will give a speed up but Im curious by how much exactly since the terrible load times of the psx drive is one of the main reasons that turns me off when I want to play on original hardware.

So my humble request is that maybe a dev or someone else who owns a PSIO could boot FF7 NTSC and do a small test I actually just need to know how long the opening fmv needs to load and how long it takes after a fight until the game returns to the field since on the demo this was instant which surprised me. If PSIO is indeed as quick as the alpha demo presented especially at this particular game that would seriously make me consider getting one because I could play classics natively without wasting hours of my life looking at a black screen.

I went ahead and did the tests for you, these are with the latest firmware. Here's the time from pressing "New Game" until the opening video starts:

CD Opening Video = 9.1 sec
PSIO Opening Video = 4.7

Returning to the field after a fight...the difference is minimal and kind of depends on the situation. If the CD needs to do a seek after the fight is over, the PSIO will be slightly faster. If not, then they're close to the same. However here is what I measured from the first fight of the game, going from the loot screen back to the train station screen:

CD Return After Fight = 2.8 sec
PSIO Return After Fight = 2.1

I did one more test for you, this was loading the game from a save. These are the times after the game is loaded from memory card, until the first video shows up on screen:

CD Load From Save = 8.6 sec
PSIO Load From Save = 6.2

My experience has been that the more the CD read head has to move to load something off the CD, the faster the PSIO will be for those tasks. This is where a majority of the speedup seems to comes from.

Thanks for doing that. Another speed up is from error correction (more so in the sense of data read errors and retries), so if you have a bad laser assembly or damaged Final Fantasy 7 CD-ROM, PSIO gains in these fields too.